Mere Christianity, Chapter 7 - Part 2

In the second part of the chapter, Lewis takes up how bad exists in
the world - either it was a good world gone wrong, or there is an
eternal battle between good and evil that can never be resolved.

Lewis takes great pains in the chapter to show how the eternal battle
between good and evil cannot be right, for evil can never be either a
force or a goal of its own. As Lewis puts it: "The badness consists
in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much."

I agreed with this argument, after running through the following
example: That of a killer. The killer uses 'good' things - strength,
willpower, intelligence, to pursue 'good' ends - pleasure,
excitement, money, or whatever. The evil comes from how he chooses to
use that strength to get that excitement - by killing, rather than
say, taking up an extreme sport, which would also use the same means
to achieve similar goals.

The implications of this logic are significant. If badness does not
come from the ends (pleasure, or excitement) or the means (use of
strength or intelligence), then where does it come from? Does it come
from intention? From action? From the result? Each of these answers
is extremely dangerous.

Many leaders of history's worst regimes had good intentions - they
were trying to 'improve' their nations, and the quicker the timetable
the more cruel and violent they became. If badness comes from
intentions, we must be prepared to call all sorts of scary and
distasteful people good. If badness comes from action, then self-
defense and legal sentences are as bad as the original crimes. If the
result is what defines badness, then whatever has the best result is
the right thing to do, and good luck predicting what the results will
be. It looks like a reasonable assertion that the 'badness' of an
action is not located anywhere within the chain of events that caused
or resulted from the action. So, where does 'badness' come from?

If we return to the economic theory of human interactions, the idea
that people will be good as long as the benefits of being good
outweigh the costs, then we begin to see an alternative definition.
Perhaps a 'bad' action is one that serves to decrease the benefits of
good behavior or increase the costs, thus weakening the motivation
for everyone else to continue to behave well, and thereby threatening
the society.

If we accept this precept, then we can say that, in our society,
breaking the rules of the road and murder are bad for precisely the
same reason - each time somebody breaks the rule, following the rules
gets less attractive for everybody else, until nobody follows the
rules and there is chaos. The only difference would be in the speed
in which the society breaks down.